GREENWICH — On a blue-sky afternoon of door-to-door campaigning, state Sen. Ryan Fazio cheerfully parried the question posed by Barbara VanDemark, a 70ish woman he encountered in her driveway: Would he be watching that night’s presidential debate?
Fazio smiled and replied, “There’s a Yankees game on.”
It was a joke, sort of. Presidential politics is a no-fly zone for Fazio, a 34-year-old Republican seeking reelection one of the places in Connecticut where a certain presidential nominee’s grip on the GOP complicates life for its candidates.
One of four Republican state senators who won with less than 51% of the vote two years ago, Fazio steered VanDemark from the presidential race to his own: He described himself as a pragmatist who brings people together, eschewing the rhetoric of division.
VanDemark nodded appreciatively.
“The Other One is so divisive,” she said.
Ah, the Other One, the candidate who must not be named. When asked, VanDemark acknowledged she indeed was referring to Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee for a third consecutive time, an era that coincides with shrinking Republican voter registration in Greenwich and tough times for the party in Hartford.
Fazio moved on, uttering nary a word about Trump. He campaigns by asking voters what’s on their mind. Rarely, he said, do they press him about Trump. But if you do ask how he voted in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, or plans to vote in 2024, Fazio politely declines.
“It’s the same thing that I’ve said for years. I think it’s proven to be true that I have an important responsibility as state senator to bring people together and solve problems, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans or unaffiliated voters,” Fazio said. “And commenting on national political issues is actually destructive, counterproductive to me accomplishing those goals of trying to bring more unity and comity to our state government and our local and state politics.”
Fazio’s race in the 36th Senate District of Greenwich, portions of Stamford and most of New Canaan is being closely watched as a measure, among other things, of the degree to which Connecticut is returning to old habits of ticket splitting — and Republicans have uncoupled from Trump.
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His initial victory in a special election in August 2021 gave beleaguered Connecticut Republicans a morale boost and drew national notice as the first state legislative seat to be flipped by either party in a year colored by Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Joe Biden.
And it came in a district where Trump had been crushed.
A Democrat had wrenched the seat from Republicans in 2018, a shock given Greenwich had habitually voted to be represented by Republicans in the Connecticut Senate. The last time a Democrat won was 1932, when Herbert Hoover and the Depression proved to be an insurmountable drag on the Republican ticket.
Fazio was seen, perhaps, as a face of a brighter GOP future, if hardly a certain one. Fazio drew 50.1% of the vote in his initial win and 2022 reelection, and neither came in a presidential year. This one is the test, an election in which Fazio will share a line on the ballot with Trump.
His Democratic opponent is Nick Simmons. As a former aide to President Joe Biden and Gov. Ned Lamont, the 35-year-old Simmons is hardly averse to associations with the titular national and state leaders of the Democratic Party. But he understands Fazio’s reticence about Trump.
“The two most unpopular politicians in Greenwich are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump,” Simmons said, only half-joking. For very different reasons, they are seen as extreme, and extreme does not play well in Greenwich, Simmons said.
At the doors, Simmons calls himself a Lamont Democrat, a moderate willing to work on bipartisan solutions to issues like Connecticut’s high electric rates and coastal flooding attributed to climate change.
Simmons doesn’t drop the names of Biden or Kamala Harris as frequently as he does Lamont’s. But he is aligned with the national ticket on abortion and gun control. He wears the bracelet of a gun-control group, Connecticut Against Gun Violence. On taxes, he is more than happy to stand with Lamont, a social progressive whose conservative fiscal policies play well here.
Casually, he’ll mention two Fazio votes on guns and abortion.
Fazio voted in 2023 against a bill that updated Connecticut’s post-Sandy Hook gun law by banning the open carry of firearms, strengthening rules for gun storage and reporting stolen firearms, and expanding a ban on AR-15s and other so-called assault weapons passed in 1993 and updated in 2013. Fazio said he objected to the one section that could subject gun owners to criminal charges for failure to report a theft
In 2022, Fazio opposed legislation that provided a legal “safe harbor” to women from states with punitive abortion laws and allowed advanced-practice clinicians such as A.P.R.N.s and physician assistants to perform abortions by suction, also known as vacuum aspiration. He said he questioned the new standard of care.
Overall, Fazio insists he supports the status quo regarding Connecticut’s stringent gun laws and its guarantee of a women’s right to abortion. The Democrats, he says, are stretching in trying to use them as wedge issues.
“Easing gun laws in Connecticut or restricting abortion in Connecticut is never — is not — going to happen. And Republicans in the legislature are not in favor of it, and Democrats in the legislature are not in favor of it,” Fazio said, “It’s pure election kind of fear mongering without basis in truth.”
Both candidates are running against polarization, a nod to exhaustion some pollsters detect with partisanship. Nearly three-in-10 voters expressed unfavorable views of both parties in a Pew Research poll last year, the highest in three decades of polling. And one quarter did not feel well-represented by either party.
In Greenwich, the biggest bloc of voters since 2016 has been unaffiliated. Republicans still outnumbered Democrats until 2021, when the COVID pandemic saw New Yorkers flee the city for Fairfield County suburbs.
On a recent campaign swing, Simmons encountered two recent transplants on the same block, each a woman working remotely from home. One had a phone in her hand, waiting for a meeting to begin.
“There’s been a lot of change,” said Scott Frantz, the Republican who lost the Senate seat in 2018.
It doesn’t hurt Simmons that Lamont, who preaches bipartisanship, is a family friend who lives in Greenwich and generally polls as one of the most popular Democratic governors in the U.S. Lamont already has a recorded a 30-second ad endorsing Simmons, yet to be released.
“He’s somebody I wanted to work for, specifically because of his practical approach, just getting things done,” Simmons said.
Simmons tends to mention at the doors that he has been cross-endorsed by the Independent Party, a first for a Democrat in Greenwich.
Simmons, 35, grew up in Greenwich, one of four children of a mixed marriage: a liberal Democratic mother and a moderate Republican father. The son’s early political leanings favored dad: He left for Yale as a moderate Republican.
“I even did an internship for Chris Shays growing up,” Simmons said.
Shays, the last Republican to represent Connecticut in Congress, lost his 4th District seat in Fairfield County to Democrat Jim Himes in 2008, when Barack Obama’s first run for president swelled turnout by Democrats and young and minority voters. Simmons sees Shays, who is campaigning for Harris and against Trump, as a disappearing breed of Republican, a moderate unafraid to be a maverick.
“I think people here would love a maverick, you know — Liz Cheney, Chris Shays, John McCain. If your party’s doing bad things, stand up to them. Speak out against it. Do things to protect us, to protect women,” Simmons said. “And that’s just not what we’ve seen.”
That would be difficult in the Greenwich Republican Party. It may be the ancestral home of George Herbert Walker Bush, but it has had its own intramural fights over how close it should be to Trump, who lost badly to Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Greenwich and even worse to Joe Biden in 2020.
In November 2021, Dan Quigley, then chair of the Republican town committee, wrote an op-ed in the Greenwich Time under the headline: “Republicans need to move on from Trump.”
“Our party must find and embrace new leadership at a national level if it is going to achieve broader success going forward,” wrote Quigley, who noted that the 36.7% vote for Trump in Greenwich was the worst showing by a Republican presidential nominee since Hoover in 1932.
Pro-Trump insurgents did not take his advice.
In January 2022, they packed the caucuses that typically elect town committee members without conflict, took control of the town committee and elected a new chair. But this year, the pro-Trump wing was repudiated, and the committee chose a new chair, Jerry Cincotta, a recently retired investment banker who ran Fazio’s campaign in 2022.
Cincotta is a cordial man who declines to revisit the RTC’s past difficulties or any complications that Trump may pose. His only on-the-record comment about the state of politics in Greenwich was deliberately bland.
“The Greenwich RTC is focused on getting our four candidates to Hartford to represent us,” Cincotta said. “They are very strong candidates, and they reflect the views of the majority of Republicans in Greenwich.”
Three of the four are trying to unseat Democratic members of the state House of Representatives. The only GOP incumbent is Fazio.
Fazio grew up in Greenwich, left to study economics at Northwestern, then returned to the area to launch a career as a commodities trader, a job that required minute-by-minute vigilance over the markets. To enable a run for office, he became an investment advisor, tracking trends and asset allocations for investors playing a longer game. It pays less, but allows him to serve in the part-time General Assembly.
In their 20s, Fazio and Simmons had social circles that intersected in New York.
After graduating from Yale, Simmons was a teacher and, at age 26, a principal at a charter school in Harlem. Then he went to Harvard for a joint master’s degree in business and public administration. He lives with his wife and infant child in Stamford. His older sister is Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons, a Democrat and former state lawmaker.
Like their parents’, her marriage is a testament to bipartisanship: Her husband is Art Linares, a Republican and former state senator.
Nick Simmons worked on Lamont’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018 and joined his administration in 2019. He left to work for a year in the Biden administration, then returned as the governor’s deputy chief of staff in 2022. He resigned in January in preparation for his campaign and the birth of his first child.
The same night Lamont was elected governor, Democrats gained five seats in a state Senate that had been evenly divided. The current Democratic majorities of 24-12 in the Senate and 98-53 in the House may be more of a liability than an asset for a Democrat trying to flip a Republican seat: The lopsided majorities take away the sense of urgency present in congressional races, where control of Congress is at stake.
They also allow Republicans to argue that even bigger Democratic majorities would be unhealthy and weaken the GOP’s role as a check of the other party’s more liberal tendencies, including a suggestion that local zoning is an impediment to developing the affordable housing that both Fazio and Simmons say are needed.
“Our government was designed inherently to have checks and balances,” said Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield. “And so when you have one party controlling literally every level of our government and controlling it for multiple decades now, it doesn’t lead to fostering the bipartisanship that I believe is necessary to create common-sense, good, positive policy for everybody.”
Fred Camillo, the Republican first selectman, calls the local GOP’s new leadership a positive force, keeping the focus on state issues. But he is unsure if that, combined with Fazio’s incumbency, will deliver the first GOP gains in a presidential election year since 2016, when down-ballot Republicans outperformed Trump in Connecticut.
“Ryan gets a slight advantage because he’s known, and he works hard, and he’s very well liked. But Nick has that advantage of, you know, the top of the ticket, based on history here,” Camillo said. “Will people just vote for that?”
You know, the top of the ticket. That’s where Nick Simmons will share a ballot line with Kamala Harris — and Ryan Fazio will be near the Other One, he who must not be named.